By William M. Arkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, March 15, 1999

There are MILO, Gyro BWO, GEM-II and RKO. They are not characters from
the new Star Wars adventure.

There is a Hindenberg line. But it has nothing to do with World War I.

And there is COBRA, neither a snake nor a health insurance plan.

All are U.S. military programs, experiments in high power microwave
technology, electronic pulse generators, pulsers and radiating antennae.

The news media may be filled with stories of terrorists armed with
electromagnetic bombs and high energy radio frequency (HERF) guns ready
to zap phones, banks, and electrical grids. But the United States is
most advanced in this field, and what appears at this time to be the
most significant radio-frequency device of the future is a U.S.
high-power microwave (HPM) weapon.

"The electron is the
ultimate precision-guided weapon."  Former CIA director John Deutch

The United States is in the final stages of developing powerful and
compact new HPM weapons which will, in theory, shut down air defenses
and communications, pulsate aircraft from the skies, throw missiles off
course, disable vehicles on the ground, and detonate fuses in exposed
munitions.

The greatest excitement, though, is for the potential that HPMs have to
destroy enemy data infrastructure, the target in any information
warfare attack. "The electron," former CIA Director John Deutch says,
"is the ultimate precision-guided weapon."

A Destructive Pulse

The concept for HPM weapons is simple and the general phenomenon has
been known since the explosion of the first atomic bombs, when huge
electromagnetic pulses were observed. Metallic objects such as wires
serve as channels for radio frequency energy. Thus, when a high-power
microwave weapon is directed at those channels, it has the potential to
burn them out.

At extremely high levels of power, pulses of high-intensity energy
internally excite components, generate intense heat, fuse or melt
electronics and destroy circuits. In other words, the pulses fry enemy
electronics in a fraction of a second, even if the target systems are
turned off.

HPM weapons have come a long way in the past decade. Miniaturization of
components, more efficient power supplies and advances in generators,
electronic pulse forming, energy conversion, and directional antennas
now make weapons of significant strength possible.

Advances in HPM generation have also coincided with the proliferation
of solid state electronics, which are much more vulnerable to destruction
by pulse than older technologies.

In 1997, the Defense Department designated High Powered Microwaves as
an Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration, militarese for a high
profile research project. The objective, according to knowledgeable
sources, is to fashion compact, 500-pound, 18-inch diameter narrow and
ultrawideband (UWB) weapons. Narrow band weapons would be directed at
specific frequencies, UWB would cover an extremely broad band of
electronic equipment.

Recently, records have been set in power output. The research suggests
workable pulse weapons in the multi-gigawatt range (billions of watts
per micro-second pulse). This is equivalent to the power generated by
dozens of power plants, as much as 1,000 times current electronic
warfare levels.

Mayhem in Mayberry

When I first saw the insignia for the HPM Demonstration with its strange
motto  "Of Mice and Men - Mayhem in Mayberry"  I thought that
Mayberry represented small town America and mayhem stood for the chaos
that would follow the weapons' use  an instant shutdown of everything
electronic in its path.

However, the Defense Department program officer responsible for the HPM
demonstration set me straight. Mayberry is the nickname scientists have
given to the area where HPMs are being tested. The buildings there, it
seems, are overrun with mice.

Where is Mayberry? The officer can't say, and for that matter the
entire demonstration is classified (it is the only Defense Department
Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration that is.)

Because the Directed Energy Directorate of the Air Force Research
Laboratory in New Mexico is the lead agency for HPM research and
development, I was sure Mayberry was there. The Directorate (formerly
Phillips Laboratory) operates a gigantic outdoor HPM test range tucked
into a canyon in the Manzano Mountains outside Albuquerque. But the lab
denies that it is Mayberry. Inquiries regarding the Army's HPM Research
Facility in Adelphi, MD went unanswered.

Money in Moscow

What's with all the secrecy?

Part of the answer is the information warfare "attack capability" that
an HPM most likely represents in the short term. The HPM information
warfare effect has been designated as the Joint Chiefs of Staff's number one
weapons development priority. Sources insist that the United States is
close to fabricating a workable computer and electronics attack weapon
that could be built into an airplane, truck, missile or drone. The
authoritative trade magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology reported
last year that the Air Force has already tested an experimental HPM
generator mounted on a cruise missile.

The second sensitivity is the degree to which U.S. scientists have
managed to form collaborations with Russian laboratories to appropriate
the best technologies and techniques that the Soviet military
laboratories once developed but can no longer sustain. Take for example,
MILO, for the magnetically insulated linear oscillator (MILO). Invented
in the United States, work was discontinued in the late 1980s. But the
Soviet Union had picked up the technology and successfully continued its
development.

Numerous other former Soviet devices  including Andrei
Sakharov's magneto-cumulative generator (MCG), an explosively driven
power supply; and PAMIR-3U, a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) generator  have been purchased from the cash-starved laboratories by U.S. HPM developers.

How ironic that the very systems Russia now sells could be returned to
sender as strategic weapons equivalent in power to nuclear missiles.

William M. Arkin, author of "The U.S. Military Online," is a leading expert on national security and the Internet. He lectures and writes on nuclear weapons, military matters and information warfare. An Army intelligence analyst from 1974 to 1978, Arkin currently consults for Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, MSNBC and the Natural Resources Defense Council.